Category Archives: Amerika

Avant Garde ~ One of the great fonts of the later, mid 20th Century. The font was chosen recently by Liz Riviere in one of our current collaborations, a website cataloging the life work by Dorothy Browdy Kushner, commissioned by her son, the artist Robert Kushner.

In doing the simple research to explain to Liz why she had hit a winner in terms of font choices, I came upon scans from the actual magazine that the font Avant Garde was designed. This discovery took me on a fast, unexpected trip down memory lane and childhood.

My father was an industrial designer, and in the late 60s subsribed to cutting edge design magazines at the time. One of those magazine was Avant Garde. This particular issue of Avant Garde

Fall brings to me a melancholy that aches deep inside my soul. Living in a place where the seasons change is both sweet and sad.

As the leaves catch fire with color, torn from the trees, falling and whirling about, the context of life shifts and becomes barren. What was once lush forest is now naked trees, standing bones awaiting the snows of winter.

As I walk through this new world at dusk I hear whispers of ancient songs, sung by the ghosts who have been released as the leaves of the trees have fallen.

The chill in the air as the season changes is only partly from the shift to oncoming winter. These ghosts sing to my melancholy, stirring up feelings that have lain dormant during the spring and summer months.… Read the rest

” One afternoon last month, I flew with Anderson to Columbus, Ohio, to watch her conduct two focus groups. The first consisted of 10 single, middle-class women in their 20s; the second, of 10 20-something men who were either jobless or employed but seeking better work. All of them voted for Obama but did not identify themselves as committed Democrats and were sufficiently ambivalent about the president’s performance that Anderson deemed them within reach of the Republicans. Each group sat around a large conference table with the pollster, while I viewed the proceedings from behind a panel of one-way glass.

The all-female focus group began with a sobering assessment of the Obama economy. All of the women spoke gloomily about the prospect of paying off student loans, about what they believed to be Social Security’s likely insolvency and about their children’s schooling.… Read the rest